Why can’t you choose me? Choose me, and I’ll—
He didn’t even know what he’d been going to say after that. He’d never gotten to finish the sentence. She had run before he could, and the unfinished half of it had sat in the back of his throat all night like something he’d forgotten to swallow.
He squeezed his eyes shut, but it wasn’t enough to escape the memories.
Kyara’s lips might be the sweetest thing he’d ever taste, but the sight of her running away from him had also destroyed him in a way that nothing else in this life could ever do.
It was already past lunchtime when Lyrius had done all the work he could remotely do from his apartment, and he had to force himself to show up at the office. While the last thing he wanted was to see Kyara and Wallace together, he also didn’t want to give either of them any reason to think he was an emotional coward, unable to handle the sight of their fairytale romance.
Lara could’ve cried in relief when the elevator doors opened, and it was her boss who finally stepped out. “Where have you been?”
Lyrius raised a brow at the unusual shrillness of Lara’s tone, and equally unusual was the way she’d almost tripped on her own feet in her rush to get to him.
“I can’t believe you’d choose to be late now of all—”
He cut her off, asking curtly, “Is there some kind of emergency?”
“Absolutely!”
Lyrius, seeing that his assistant was about to shove her phone straight into his face, simply sniped the device from her hold.
“Look at it!”
Lyrius could only wince at how Lara was shrieking at every word. “Whatever this is—”
“It’s about Kyara!”
Lyrius was about to look at Lara’s phone but stopped the moment he heard her name. “I don’t need to hear anything—”
“You don’t understand!” Lara was so, so tempted to give her boss a good and hard shake. “You really need—”
“You’re the one who doesn’t understand,” Lyrius snapped.
“No, I mean it—”
“I told her I love her,” he snarled. “I told her he was cheating on her, and she still fucking chose him. That should be easy enough for you to understand so if you don’t mind—”
He tried giving Lara back her phone, but she pushed it back to him.
“Please just look—”
Lara was once again relieved when her boss seemed to finally see reason as he took her phone back—
Oh, finally!
—just so he could throw her phone in the trash.
“Seriously?”
“Get a new one on the company card. Get your husband one as well. Just don’t fucking—”
“Please.”
Lyrius stopped.
The trash can was the one beside the reception desk, two strides away, and Lara’s phone had landed face up among the discarded coffee cups, and from that distance the speaker was tiny and faint but the voice—
The voice was Kyara’s.
